Who Sells the Best Network Switching Solutions for the Enterprise?
Like most tech questions, this isn’t a simple one to answer.
Simply browsing for enterprise switches won’t do you much good if you don’t also take into consideration your company’s infrastructure, future outlook, budget, size and more when making your final decision.
Without getting into too much detail, we’ve outlined our top five picks for switches vendors in today’s market below. We based these decisions on experience and successful results that our own diverse clientele has received.
To know which exact switching solution is perfect for your company, we’d have to do a little more digging into your IT specifics. If this is something that you’re interested in after reading the company overviews below, contact us to schedule an audit so that we can start finding your optimal solution today.
Top Five Switching Solution Providers of 2017
1. Cisco
Topping our list, a name you’ve no doubt heard before and one of our trusted partners, is Cisco.
A tech industry giant, Cisco is not well-known on a fluke. We’ve seen success across hundreds of deployments for many different companies with highly-diverse infrastructures.
Cisco’s switching solutions are great for small companies all the way up to large enterprise networks comprised of several data centers, and they’re optimized for a range of industries including public, financial and service.
Cisco Switching Solutions Include:
Blade Switches
- For Dell, FSC, HP and IBM blade servers, these I/O solutions let you deploy a virtualized data center infrastructure and can lower your TCO while improving end-user and IT productivity.
Campus LAN Switches – Access
- Bring wireless and wired together with Cisco Catalyst access switches that drive digital transformation through scalability, reliability and efficiency.
Campus LAN Switches – Compact
- Small, yet powerful, switches that extend enterprise-level services wherever you want. These simplified switches scale easily over time and increase network security.
Campus LAN Switches – Core and Distribution
- These highly-intelligent, innovative core and distribution switches evolve network security, simplicity and scalability for the enterprise.
Data Center Switches
- If you’re looking for industry-leading automation, programmability and real-time visibility for your data center, these switches are for you. They automate and simplify operations, scale with cloud scale technology and greatly increase security with comprehensive protection.
- Data Center Network Management
- Data Center Switches With Cisco IOS Software
- Energy and Asset Management
Industrial Ethernet Switches
- These easy-to-deploy switches are designed for industrial/manufacturing environments looking to improve uptime, lower TCO, improve production flexibility and easily manage data.
- Infiniband Switches
- LAN Network Management
- LAN Switches – Small Business
- Service Provider Switches – Aggregation
- Service Provider Switches – Ethernet Access
Virtual Networking
- For application-centric business environment, these platforms increase speed, security, agility and simplicity.
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- Cloud Networking Services
- WAN Switches
- MGX Switches
- Other WAN Switching Products
2. Juniper Networks
Juniper comes in at number two on our list because we have seen comparable success with these switches to that experienced with Cisco solutions.
About 12 years Cisco’s junior, Juniper was founded in the late ‘90s and has been challenging the tech giant in the routing and switching market ever since.
With a series of solutions for branch, campus and data center, Juniper Networks offers carrier-class, high-density Ethernet switches that are designed to optimize enterprise economics with lower OPEX.
Top features include the Junos OS single operating system, comprehensive security, and streamlined automation and scalability.
Juniper Switching Solutions Include:
EX Series Ethernet Switches
- Carrier-class switches designed for converged enterprise branches, campuses, and data centers, and for service providers, that address the growing demands of high availability, unified communications and virtualization.
QFX Series Switches
- These switches meet the needs of today’s most demanding enterprise and service provider environments. This efficient, high-density platform is designed for top-of-rack, end-of-row and spine-and-core aggregation deployments.
OCX1100
- HPE’s OCX1100 is an Open Compute Project (OCP) hardware platform designed to deliver cost-effective switching for cloud deployments.
Data Center Switching Architectures
- High-performance, high-density platforms required to build innovative data center fabrics scalable to thousands of ports.
3. HPE
HPE is another contender on this list with which our clients have experienced great success. HPE’s scalable solutions are great for smaller, growing businesses as well as large branch and campus environments.
Top features include fast connectivity, increased visibility into your network and efficient policy management.
HPE Switching Solutions Include:
Aruba Switches
- Flexible, industry-leading wired solutions for wireless aggregation with HPE Smart Rate multi-gigabit technology.
FlexNetwork Switches
- This core solution has the performance, security and manageability to aggregate data quickly and increase collaboration.
Data Center Switches
- Looking to transition to a cloud-first network? Move at the speed of business apps, and eliminate downtime and outages.
4. Arista
Though we have less experience with Arista than with the top three companies on this list, our engineers have built and deployed a few successful routing and switching solutions for companies whose architecture was a match and whose IT requested it.
With many solutions to choose from, there’s an option for every enterprise environment.
Arista Switching Solutions Include:
7500 Series
- 7500R – Modular switches designed for large virtualized and cloud networks
- 7500E – Modular switches designed for large virtualized and cloud networks
7300 Series
- Designed for large scale leaf / spine and Spline™ networks
7280 Series
- 7280R – Designed for next generation IP storage, Content Delivery, leaf and spine networks and data centers
- 7280E Series – Built for storage networks, Content Delivery networks, and lossless spline/leaf datacenter designs
7250X Series
- For software-driven cloud networking, big data, cloud, virtualized and traditional deployments
7150 Series
- For low-latency financial markets, HPC clusters and virtualized data centers
7160 Series
- Built for the highest-performance environments and the largest-scale data centers
7060X Series
- Ideal for traditional or fully-virtualized data centers
7050X Series
- For software-driven cloud networking, big data, cloud, virtualized and traditional deployments
7020R Series
- Designed for IP storage, Content Delivery and leaf and spine networks
7010 Series
- For high-density data center deployments
5. Nokia
With fewer options than the top four spots on this list, Nokia’s premier switching solution, the 7210 SAS product family, provides deployment flexibility, service richness and operational intelligence to extend IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet throughout your metro access network.
We have not worked closely with Nokia solutions for our customers in the past, but we are open-minded to any options that will help our clients meet their IT requirements. As such, we can’t speak to direct success with these solutions, but we will be on the lookout for Nokia news and specs as the market changes.
Nokia Switching Solutions Include:
7210 Service Access Switch Family
With a wide variety of platforms, this series is widely used in industry, public sector and enterprise applications and is optimal for business VPN, residential broadband, demarcation and mobile backhaul.
Find the Right Switches for Your Enterprise With CTC Technologies, Inc.
When choosing a switching solution, different pros and cons may appeal to you and your team depending on your current infrastructure, future outlook (i.e. growth) and budget.
Before making the choice, consider how each vendor above would relate to your company’s physical, as well as speculative, needs and wants.
If you’re looking for detailed information or to schedule an audit and demo, please fill out our contact form, and one of our trusted sales engineers will reach out to you as soon as possible.
Need a faster response? Give us a call at 734.408.0200.